Strong sales of Spam, Dinty Moore stew and chili helped Hormel Foods Corp. post a 6 percent increase in first quarter sales in its grocery products unit.Consumers have trimmed household budgets and postponed buying cars, major appliances and other big-ticket items. Sounds like folks are laying in canned goods for the long downturn. Washington continues to spew out propaganda but, reality is, folks are hoarding and conserving funds. Recession shoppers also are drawn to items that make them feel safe, both personally and financially."The focus on the family hearth is something that has happened in nearly every recession.http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Hot-in...3&asset=&ccode=

America has been trapped for over two centuries, with today's debt level way exceeding developing nations. Like bankrupt people staying "afloat by making the minimum payment(s) on (their) credit card(s), the government (avoids) bankruptcy by paying just the interest on its monster debt" - now double in size since Brown's first edition and onerous enough for Controller of the Currency David Walker to warn earlier of its unaffordability by this year. If America can't service the amount, it's officially bankrupt and the economy will collapse. If it happens, IMF austerity will follow and turn America into Guatemala. Other vulnerable economies as well - permanent debt bondage and worker serfdom.

Catherine Austin Fitts was a former high-level Wall Street and government insider. She points to a "financial coup d'etat" conspiracy between the two to hollow out America, centralize power and knowledge, shift wealth to the top, destroy communities and local infrastructure, create new wealth by rebuilding them, and leave human wreckage in its wake.

She also calls today's crisis "a criminal leveraged buyout of America (meaning) buying (the) country for cheap with its own money and then jacking up the rents and fees to steal the rest." She calls it the "American Tapeworm" model:

It's "to simply finance the federal deficit through warfare, currency exports, Treasury and federal credit borrowing and cutbacks in domestic 'discretionary' spending...This will then place local municipalities and local leadership in a highly vulnerable position - one that will allow them to be persuaded with bogus but high-minded sounding arguments to further cut resources. Then to 'preserve bond ratings and the rights of creditors,' our leaders can be persuaded to sell our water, national resources and infrastructure assets at significant discounts of their true value to global investors" - masquerading as a plan to "save America by recapitalizing it on a sound financial footing."

In fact, it's to loot the country by shifting wealth offshore and to the top. Also, to destroy the country's middle class, consign US workers to serfdom, then meet expected civil disobedience with military force, followed by mass internment in over 800 FEMA detention camps in every state.

Today, the rich are getting richer while millions of Americans struggle daily to get by and live perilously from paycheck to paycheck, a mere one away from insolvent disaster.

Given where we're heading, Warren Buffett warns that America is changing from an "ownership society" to a "sharecroppers' " one, no different than feudal serfdom. Economist Paul Krugman calls it "debt peonage," much like the post-Civil War South that forced debtors to work for their creditors.

Make no mistake, it's a corporate America scheme for a plentiful reserve army of labor no better off than in developing countries - at low wages, no benefits, weak unions if any, and government engineering the whole scheme. Even personal bankruptcy protection eroded under the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection of 2005 - benefitting lenders at the expense of borrowers by keeping them chained to their debts.

It requires many more people "to file under Chapter 13, which does not eliminate debts but mandates that they be repaid under a court-ordered payment schedule over a three to five year period." Homes, in some cases, may be seized and even owe a "deficiency, or balance due" if its sales price doesn't cover it. This Act "eroded the protection the government once provided against (various) unexpected catastrophes (like job loss and high medical expenses) ensuring that working people (henceforth) are kept on a treadmill of personal debt."

Even worse are loopholes in the law letting "very wealthy people and corporations....go bankrupt....and shield(ing) their assets from creditors..." This bill was written at the behest of credit card companies that entrap consumers in debt, charge usurious interest, and demand repayment no matter what besets them. In one respect, debt bondage is worse than slavery. As property, slaves had to be cared for. Debt slaves have to fend for themselves and pay tribute (interest) to their captors.

The US Treasury’s effort to stabilise the banking system through the TARP programme is a hopelessly ill-conceived policy that enriches speculators at public expense, according to the buy-out firm supposed to be pioneering the joint public-private bank rescues.

“The taxpayers ought to know that we are in effect receiving a subsidy. They put in 40pc of the money but get little of the equity upside,” said Mark Patterson, chairman of MatlinPatterson Advisers.

“It’s a sham. The banks are insolvent. The US government is trying to sedate the public because they are down to the last $100bn (£66bn) of the $700bn TARP funds. They think they’re doing this for the greater good of society,” he said, speaking at the Qatar Global Investment Forum.

Mr Patterson said it would be better for the US to bite the bullet as Britain has done, accepting that crippled lenders must be nationalised. “At least the British are not hiding the bail-out,” he said.

The comments are likely to infuriate Tim Geithner, the US Treasury Secretary, because MatlinPatterson took advantage of the TARP’s matching funds to buy Flagstar Bancorp in Michigan. His confession appears to validate concerns that the bail-out strategy is geared towards Wall Street.
Under the convoluted deal agreed earlier this year, MatlinPatterson has come to own 80pc of the shares while the US government has ended up with under 10pc.http://www.istockanalyst.com/article...icleid/3234218

The US Treasury’s effort to stabilise the banking system through the TARP programme is a hopelessly ill-conceived policy that enriches speculators at public expense, ...

Yep. One could express it that way.

Quote:

...
Under the convoluted deal agreed earlier this year, MatlinPatterson has come to own 80pc of the [Flagstar] shares while the US government has ended up with under 10pc.

Ha, good job, Patterson, well done.

However, as the story goes on to say:

Quote:

Matlin Patterson, however, has missed the Spring rebound, the most powerful rise in equities in over 70 years. “We shorted the equity rally because we thought it was lunatic. We’ve kept adding positions seven times, and we’re still holding,” he said. Ouch!

He missed how the paper-trading markets have decoupled from the general economy. It's possible for markets to go their own way, for limited periods of time, and especially so with such strong Treasury and Federal Reserve support as the markets have now.

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It doesn't mean steel workers, of course, they're the kind of "service jobs" that were supposed to be America's future. Ha.

AmEx had already announced 7000 job cuts last October, and this 4000 is in addition to that.

One thing I find interesting is how many employees these financial service companies have, Amex is listed as having 66,000 employees. If I was in charge of them and was purely trying to maximize profit.. I'd go to a few big data centers and automate basically everything. Then a few call centers spread around the world for redundancy to interact with the customers.

The USA based employment would be a few brilliant programmers and server farm managers, and a few financial 'experts' to figure out the spreads and such.

When I looked at the banks it was also surprising how many employees they have like Citigroup 330,000. A great deal are doing just speculation or endless bureaucracy. With modern computer accounting software they don't need the legions of clerks from days gone by.. yet they never downsized since the arrival of that software.

It seems to me if they stay under pressure for profits it will be a no brainer to just perpetually reduce staff.